Fast-Drying Fountain Pen Inks

December 13, 2016 solespen

For all the benefits that fountain pens have to offer, they aren’t known for drying quickly. Depending on the pen, ink, and paper, you can find yourself waiting an entire minute or longer watching ink dry. For lefties and people who like to jot notes in a pocket notebook, this can make fountain pens seem utterly impractical. But rest assured, there are plenty of fast-drying inks that won’t leave you hanging. Let’s take a look at our top fast-drying inks, then delve into a comparison of the drying times of all our fountain pen inks.

Recommendations

Top Choice: Noodler’s Bernanke Blue

Noodler’s Bernanke Blue

For a fast-drying, all-purpose fountain pen ink, we recommend Noodler’s Bernanke Blue. An attractive azure blue, it dries in under 10 seconds on virtually any paper when used in a fine nib pen. It has a tendency to feather slightly more than a typical ink, but not so much that it will be distracting to most people.

The ink’s name is a humorous reference to Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the Federal Reserve whose quantitative easing policies during the recent global financial crisis greatly expanded the US money supply in order to combat deflation. The ink represents the Fed’s need for a quick-drying ink to print a lot of money quickly. For a black or blue black ink with similar performance, check out Noodler’s Bernanke Black and Q-E’ternity.

Also Consider: Lamy Blue

Lamy Blue

If you use a wetter pen or just can’t stand the slight feathering of Bernanke Blue, we recommend Lamy Blue. A well-behaved, dry-flowing ink, Lamy Blue pairs particularly well with wet-flowing pens that would exacerbate the feathering tendencies of other, less well-behaved inks. It takes just over 10 seconds to dry using a fine nib on Rhodia paper—a bit slower than Bernanke Blue but still much faster than an average ink.

Colorful Alternatives: Pelikan 4001 Violet & J. Herbin Cacao du Brésil

Pelikan 4001 Violet & J. Herbin Cacao du Brésil

If standard blue and black inks bore you to tears, check out these colorful alternatives. The energetic Pelikan 4001 Violet dries even faster than Lamy Blue, and the rustic J. Herbin Cacao du Brésil takes a little longer but still dries in under 20 seconds with a fine nib on Rhodia.

Absolute Fastest-Drying Inks: Noodler’s Polar Blue, Polar Brown, & Polar Green

Noodler’s Polar Blue, Polar Brown, & Polar Green

If you just want the fastest-drying inks you can get and don’t mind feathering, Noodler’s Polar Blue, Polar Brown, and Polar Green are the clear winners. They dry in just over 3 seconds on Rhodia and almost instantly on copy paper, regardless of nib size. They’re also freeze resistant (meaning they won’t expand and burst your pen if left out in the car during winter), bulletproof (meaning they resist water, solvents, and UV light), and lubricated (meaning they help keep piston-filling pens and converters operating smoothly).

Fastest-Drying Inks By Color

Fastest-Drying Inks for Each Color Group

In our crazed quest to expand the limits of ink knowledge, some might say we go a little overboard. We beg to differ. Testing the waterproofness of every single one of our fountain pen inks revealed some surprising and useful results, and testing their drying times proved no less enlightening.

Click below to see the five fastest-drying inks we found from each color group. Some of the very fastest-drying inks experience significant feathering even on fountain pen friendly paper. These inks are indicated by a yellow sad face in the rightmost column, while inks that behave well on fountain pen friendly paper are indicated by a green happy face.

Black Inks
Black Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Blue Inks
Blue Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Blue Black Inks
Blue Black Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Brown Inks
Brown Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Gray Inks
Gray Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Green Inks
Green Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Orange Inks
Orange Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Pink Inks
Pink Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Purple Inks
Puple Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Red Inks
Red Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Turquoise Inks
Turquoise Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

Yellow Inks
Yellow Inks

Ink	3 Sec	10 Sec	20 Sec	30 Sec	60 Sec

The tests were done on Rhodia DotPad paper with a 1.1 mm TWSBI ECO dipped in ink, writing a series of X’s and smearing them after 3, 10, 20, 30, and 60 seconds. The italic nib of the ECO creates broad downstrokes and fine side-strokes, letting us see the drying time for both fine and broad nibs with a single series of X’s. Inks dry differently on different papers, so the times you experience may be shorter or longer than what we saw, but the relative performances should stay the same, with one exception that we’ll cover in the next section.

Considerations

Feathering

Feathering from Noodler’s Polar Blue and Fox Red

As we saw above, some of the fastest-drying inks—particularly among Noodler’s inks—tend to feather badly. This is because they are specially formulated to penetrate into the page quickly so that they don’t leave a pool of smearable ink on the surface. This quick-penetrating ability also causes the ink to spread out more through the paper fibers, giving lines a fuzzy or feathery appearance. Not all fast-drying inks feather, though, and inks will behave differently on different papers.

Pigment and “Bulletproof” Inks

All inks will dry a bit slower on smooth papers like Rhodia than they will on rougher paper like normal copy paper, but pigmented inks and Noodler’s “bulletproof” inks are particularly affected. As you can see, J. Herbin Perle Noire—a typical dye-based ink—takes 10 seconds longer to dry on Rhodia paper than on copy paper, but the pigmented Sailor Nano Kiwa-guro and bulletproof Noodler’s Black inks take over 30 seconds longer to dry on Rhodia paper.

Index of Drying Time Results

Here you can see how all of our inks rank in terms of drying time. Click below to see the drying time results for all of the inks in each color group.